


Count of Three

by forthegreatergood



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Getting Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 20:25:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5798746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All three of them have some adjusting to do, after the dust settles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Count of Three

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Disney/Lucasfilms/etc. Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Finn leaned on the balcony railing and watched dawn creep over the forest beyond the base’s perimeter.

“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

Rey braced her elbows on the railing and leaned into him. He leaned back, grateful for her presence. Life with the Resistance had been one adjustment after another until it had begun to feel like a round of the First Order’s reconditioning protocols. Just existing here could be baffling; the First Order had at least come with written regulations.

His sense of personal space was far smaller than most of the personnel he’d run into here. And the--unspoken, almost unexplainable--rules were different between people he knew and people he didn’t, even though they were all a part of the Resistance. If he was _with_ someone, he was allowed to get closer than if he was just occupying the same room incidentally, even if he’d been introduced to them. There were all sorts of tiers to memorize that had nothing to do with rank, and he’d quickly discovered that it wasn’t just the people he got too close to that he risked offending. He’d run afoul of their friends, their lovers, and stray observers, too. 

Even making amends for the infraction was a nebulous affair. If he’d walked closer than two paces behind General Hux while on escort duty, or fallen too far back, he’d have been on half-rations for a day, run extra drills for a week, and lost his free shifts for a month. But that would have been the end of it, provided he violated no other regulations. Here, he was still getting glares from an intel officer’s girlfriend a month after seeming too intimate for the situation and apologizing when it was pointed out.

Rey’s comfort zone, on the other hand, was either a kilo wide or non-existent. Strangers were kept at a safe distance, and people she considered friends were cozied up to in a way Finn had seen only romantic partners practice here. The division between threat and comfort was sharp enough that Finn didn’t have to ask if she’d seen more of one than the other.

Finn looped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, and she rested her head on his shoulder. The contact was a relief, a bright spot in a life that had crumbled under his feet too often for him to trust it anymore. Rey soaked it up like a plant that had gone too long without rain, and he felt a burst of pride at being able to pay her back in kind. 

The sense of being a burden was new, too. The First Order had been clear about what was owed. They were fed and clothed, sheltered and trained, protected and perfected. Everything they had, everything they were, had been for the greater glory of the First Order and its mission. In return, it had demanded their obedience. They were to follow orders, follow protocol, follow their training, all to the very best of their ability, all without question or hesitation. How to better serve the First Order was to be their first and last waking thought. 

The Resistance had been feeding him and keeping him safe. They’d put him back together when Kylo Ren had tried to take him apart. He’d been given private quarters, a luxury compared to the barracks the pilots and infantry shared, and no one had taken him to task when Rey had moved in without approval. In return, he gave...ten hours a day. 

There were even days when the only thing for him to do was answer a few questions about First Order procedure that an intel officer needed for a future mission, or run diagnostics on the waste management systems, or pitch in with routine maintenance on the solar cells. He’d volunteered for flight training, but his name was at the bottom of a lengthy list; even once he started, it would be a long time before he was competent enough to be trusted with a shuttle. No one had said anything to him about his negligence, and it wasn’t deliberate on his part. But Finn could still see the scales growing heavier and heavier on one side, and he was at a loss as to how to balance them.

He didn’t want to go back to being a combatant. There were nights when he dreamed of the massacre at Tuanul, only in his dreams he somehow swallowed his panic at the wrongness of it and pulled the trigger when Phasma said “Fire.” Those nights he woke up with his heart pounding out of his chest, his hands shaking, and his stomach roiling. Even Rey crawling into bed with him and telling him it was just a dream weren’t enough to soothe him back to sleep. 

But he’d been good at it, before Jakku. He’d acquitted himself well in firefights with Resistance soldiers. He’d even received a commendation for one particularly fraught battle with Republic forces. And the Resistance always needed seasoned fighters.

He’d tried to talk to Poe about it, but there were only so many times Finn could see that profoundly sad, horrified look on Poe’s handsome face and know he’d been responsible for putting it there. Poe was a kind man and a good friend, and Finn hated turning his attempts to bond into an exploration of the ways in which Finn’s time with the First Order had rendered him unfit for life outside it. 

There was also a queasy feeling of exposure when it happened, like discovering that he’d somehow left the breastplate off his armor and was walking into enemy territory. How many times could Poe pity him like that before deciding he wasn’t worth the effort? There had been a written metric in the First Order, a calculation to determine when a trooper was a write-off. A commanding officer could appeal it if they felt a trooper could be successfully retrained or reconditioned and made useful again, but Finn had only ever heard of that happening once. Finn was sure Poe’s decision would be based on instinct, an intuitive and unpredictable and utterly indisputable response, and he somehow dreaded it more than he’d ever feared the prospect of a liquidation.

Finn hadn’t even realized the enormity of what he was confessing when he’d given Poe a unit designation instead of a name. He’d had a better sense of it when he’d offered Poe the day he’d been inducted into the First Order as his birthday, because that’s what had been celebrated all his life, and recited the regulation against evacuating non-mobile casualties from an active conflict to explain his initial confusion at waking up in the infirmary after falling to Kylo Ren. They were things that he was angry about, now that he was slowly getting his mind around the enormity of the First Order’s lies and the extent to which they’d warped his life. Poe, on the other hand, had looked as if he might be sick.

It was easier with Rey. She knew about debts, and how alien the base could seem, and how cheap life could be under the wrong circumstances.

“How come you couldn’t sleep?” Finn asked gently, kissing the top of her head.

His own nightmares fell into certain well-worn ruts. He’d been too much of a coward to rescue Poe, and the warm light in those brown eyes had been snuffed out forever. He’d been left behind to die in the snow and fire when Starkiller Base had exploded, awake but too weak to help himself. He’d been too late to rescue Rey, and she had died with the starkiller. 

The worst were the ones in which he was caught by the First Order; instead of killing him, they reconditioned him, put him back in the armor, and gave him back to Phasma. It inevitably felt like coming home, like he was back where he belonged. Want and fear and doubt were cauterized away, leaving the flat, unswerving certainty they’d always wanted from him. Whenever he had that dream, he spent the next few days feeling like a monster. What sort of man secretly longed for the familiar at the expense of what was right? 

Rey’s nightmares, he’d learned, came in a near-infinite variety. The only pattern he could pick up was that they seemed to hit her in waves, and that it was unwise to stand too close when waking her. One night she’d be caught in her blankets and dream she was smothering in quicksand. The next she’d be lost in the desert with a broken-down speeder and no parts to fix it. The night afterward would be a fight with the Knights of Ren, except that cutting them down revealed her face under the masks. The next month or so would be clear sailing, with Rey sleeping soundly and waking up bright-eyed and ready to meet the day. The only ones that made her cry were about her family, either them leaving in the first place or coming back and not finding her.

“Do you think Kylo Ren hates you?” Rey asked. 

She didn’t step away to look at him, the way she had before she’d gone to meet Skywalker, and Finn supposed she didn’t have to see him to read him now. Or possibly she was finally satisfied that she knew everything about him and didn’t have to be on the lookout for some hidden agenda. He missed being given the extra clue to why she might be asking, though. Had she dreamed about the fight? Something from when Kylo had been interrogating her? Or some coming battle? Finn tried not to think about the wild rumors about Jedi that he’d heard as a child. They certainly didn’t hide under bunks, waiting to get cadets who failed to qualify at the blaster range. They probably couldn’t predict the future, either. He thought for a moment before he answered.

“No,” Finn said. “He doesn’t think of stormtroopers as…” He paused, trying for the right word. “...people. We’re just equipment, to the high command. He’d never stoop to notice an individual trooper. He might hate you, or General Hux, or Commander Skywalker, or Captain Phasma, but he’s about as likely to hate me as he is to go around hating a malfunctioning astromech droid. He was furious because I was in his way. As soon as I wasn’t, I’m sure he stopped giving a damn about me.”

Rey grunted, not entirely satisfied. Finn considered the way Kylo had cut the old man down in Tuanul. He hadn’t seemed to give it more thought than crushing an insect, once he’d done it.

“And even if he did, he probably thinks I’m dead,” Finn continued. “The base was collapsing by then. He wouldn’t have stopped to take me with him, if he was you. I’m sure he assumes you left me behind, if he realized I was still alive at all.”

Rey relaxed against him. “That makes sense.”

“Why did you ask?” Finn wasn’t entirely sure he wanted the answer, but if it had just been a nightmare, he might be able to coax her back to sleep.

“Poe said you’d talked about volunteering for special missions, like what he was on when he was captured. He didn’t think it was a good idea.” Rey put her arm around his waist. “He didn’t say it, but he was worried about what would happen if they picked you up, if they knew who you were.”

“Oh.” 

Finn hadn’t meant that sort of mission. The odds of the Resistance trusting him with anything particularly sensitive without being driven to it by desperation were, in his opinion, fairly low. He’d been thinking of the sorties into contested territory to destroy First Order supply depots and give Republic forces an advantage to press, or the extra security diverted to protect important convoys. 

Though he supposed he hadn’t ever gotten around to saying. Poe had looked unhappy, and Finn had stopped talking. But it made sense that the last handful of his own assignments still loomed large in Poe’s mind. Finn suddenly frowned at the idea of Poe being worried about someone else when it came to dangerous missions. He’d been in bad shape when Finn had broken him out of holding, and Finn’s gut twisted at the memory. 

“I don’t remember things working out so great for him, either.”

Rey snorted. “And he didn’t shove a stormtrooper captain down a garbage chute on his last run.”

Finn shifted his weight uneasily. Phasma wasn’t _a_ captain. Phasma was _the_ captain. And she’d probably have been less angry if he’d had the guts to shoot her. He cleared his throat. “What’s all that got to do with Kylo Ren?”

“Luke--who doesn’t really go by Commander anymore? You know, for when you meet him. Something about Jedi being all the title he needs.” Rey shrugged, her bony shoulder jabbing into his ribs. “He talked about using the Force to tell when people were close, or in trouble. He knew when General Solo died. When he was on the mission to destroy the second Death Star, he blew their cover because Vader could sense his presence. Something similar happened between Vader and Luke’s first master, too. And if Kylo Ren might be able to sense you, that could be really bad.”

“I think you’ve got more to worry about on that score than I do,” Finn told her. The idea of Kylo Ren being able to track him like he had a tracer implanted somewhere sent a shiver down his spine, but Finn would stake a pile of credits on the Supreme Leader’s right hand not being able to remember his designation code by now. But Rey? She was training with a Jedi master, and she’d already bested Kylo twice. It wouldn’t offend his ego to face her like an equal. And they’d been in each other’s heads. Finn figured if there was a shortcut to being able to feel when someone was nearby, that would be it.

“Maybe,” she said. “I just think it would be better if you stuck close to the base for now. And I don’t think anyone else understood what you were talking about when you said you could increase the yield in the hydroponic garden by twenty percent if they’d let you recycle the waste filtration cartridges. If you start disappearing for weeks at a time, that project’s definitely not getting done.”

“You make a compelling argument,” Finn chuckled. He wondered how she’d heard about that. She’d been off learning to use the Force when he’d suggested it, and so far the only progress they’d made had been a few rounds of corrected and improved plans. Even Poe’s eyes had glazed over when he’d started talking about it, so he couldn’t imagine it was the subject of much after-hours chatter. The concept wasn’t even especially radical; the design dated back to at least the first Death Star.

“Good.” Rey wriggled out from under his arm and took his hand. “Now come to bed.”

* * *

“Well?” Poe asked, impatient and picking at his food.

“Well?” Rey echoed, arching her eyebrows. Poe scowled at her.

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yes, I talked to him.”

“And?”

“He said I make a compelling argument,” Rey said, grinning. Poe groaned and rubbed his temples. “Can I ask you something?”

“So long as it’s not about sex,” Poe said cautiously.

Rey flushed hot. That had been one time, and it had been Finn who’d answered the question, anyway. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had upset Poe so badly about the whole discussion.

“Why didn’t you talk to him yourself?” 

Rey took a bite of dinner and waited for him to answer. It was some sort of thin noodles in a brown sauce, and the way it was spiced bit at her tongue. Poe had convinced her to try food that didn’t, as he put it, come in vacusealed pouches. It tasted good, better than what she’d grown up with, and she’d be the first to admit it. But without Finn sitting next to her, hip to hip and knee to knee, pooling their resources to work out exactly what condiment went with what dish and how they were supposed to be eaten, trying something new made her feel like she was just advertising the fact that she was a stranger. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and her palm ache for the grip of her quarterstaff. She felt like a mark when she stood out like that, with no one to watch her back. Poe was wonderful, but he belonged. She didn’t. She wasn’t sure who he’d side with if there was trouble.

“It can be hard for him to talk to me sometimes,” Poe said after a moment. “Sometimes it’s like he says what he thinks I want to hear instead of what he wants to say. I’ve never seen him do that with you.”

Rey chewed thoughtfully. Finn didn’t like disappointing people, which made sense. The First Order didn’t take that sort of thing well, she was sure. Maybe she wasn’t as easy to disappoint as Poe? Or maybe he wasn’t as afraid of disappointing her. She hadn’t saved him from the First Order, after all. She hadn’t given him a name. He’d been willing to do almost as much just to carry out what he’d thought was Poe’s dying wish as he’d been willing to do to keep her in one piece. Then again, there was a distance between them that Poe hadn’t been able to close yet. Maybe it was just that Finn trusted her more.

“He didn’t seem bent on it, did he?” Poe asked, his eyes crinkling. “He’s got plenty to take out of the First Order’s hide, I know, but he’s.” Poe stopped and picked at his tray again. “Not like that. Not really.”

Rey shook her head immediately and emphatically. 

“No, he isn’t.” For all his training and everything the First Order had tried to teach him, Finn’s first instinct was still to protect, not to attack. On Jakku, there had barely been time to breathe in the space between her yelling at him about the jacket and him grabbing her hand and trying to save her from an airstrike. That she hadn’t needed saving hadn’t stopped him from trying. “When we were on Takodana, he wanted to keep going and just get as far away from them as he could. And he only signed up for the run on the starkiller to help me.”

Poe picked up his roll and tore it into pieces without eating it. “Do you think I’m overreacting? It’s not like I’m trying to keep him out of the fight entirely. We don’t have enough people to spare, and even if we did, I wouldn’t do that to someone. I just don’t want him heading into a situation where he might be recognized.”

“Like on Takodana,” she said.

“Like on Takodana.” Poe nodded.

“In his defense, it sounds like he held off the guy with the riot baton pretty well,” Rey pointed out. 

Nines, Finn had called him. They’d known each other. She thought, from the look on Finn’s face when he talked about him, that they might have been friends. She’d been tempted to ask if he’d had other friends, but bringing up the parts of his life which hadn’t been so bad always seemed to lead right back into the parts that had been awful. That was something Rey understood, at least. There would be a time to talk about it, later. When it wasn’t so close. She couldn’t remember exactly when she’d finally been able to talk about the day she’d come to Jakku without crying, but she knew she’d been big enough to ride a luggabeast all by herself. She hoped Finn would get there more quickly. Talking things over with trusted friends made it easier to see the shape of things, or how problems could be solved.

“In my defense, if Solo hadn’t shot the guy with the riot baton, Finn could have been killed. Or captured, then killed,” Poe said sourly. “It’s one thing to take a dangerous assignment, but it’s something else to go into a bad situation that could be made worse any second by your old bunkmate suddenly catching sight of you and charging across the field at you because you still owe him ten credits.”

“I’m more worried about Kylo Ren,” Rey sighed. She stole some of Poe’s disintegrated roll and used it to mop up the leftover sauce from her plate, then stole more when he didn’t complain about the first theft.

“Why?” Poe looked surprised, then alarmed. 

“He blew up his planet,” Rey reminded him.

“Well, we _all_ did that,” Poe laughed. Some of the tension left his shoulders. “He’ll be working his way through a pretty long list, there. Are you sure he...lived through it?”

Rey nodded. “The General and Luke Skywalker are, too.”

Finn had made sense, when he’d told her Kylo Ren probably thought he was dead. There was a logic to it that she’d taken comfort in at the time. And it had made sense, too, that Kylo would see a lone stormtrooper as unworthy of his attention. But when he’d been trying to pry the map from her mind, and she’d reached back, Finn hadn’t been far from Kylo’s thoughts. Granted, it hadn’t been the Finn she knew; to Kylo, he was one head of the hydra, the first of a coming avalanche of mutinous stormtroopers, a form to give his fears shape. But that had been before Finn had picked up the lightsaber and fought him. Before Finn had wounded him. 

There was something else, too, the sort of feeling Luke had told her to trust, but she’d found difficult to put into precise words. With Finn, she could just say “the Force” and he would accept it as an untranslatable, mystical thing, something neither of them had ever been given the vocabulary for. Other members of the Resistance expected specifics, or gawked at her like a curiosity.

Poe lapsed into silence and finally started eating.

“You should talk to him yourself,” Rey said. “I think it would make more sense coming from you.”

“Every time I track him down, he’s busy,” Poe managed around a mouthful of noodles. He swallowed and wiped his mouth on his napkin. “He gets more work done than three other techs combined. He’s been here seven months, only on his feet for six of them, and I swear the place would fall down around our ears without him. I’m probably worrying over nothing. Even if he put in for hazard-duty, who would approve it?” Poe shook his head, smiling gently to himself. “Did you know he helped replace the power converters on the solar bank last week? Jessika’s mother couldn’t stop telling me how wonderful he is. I don’t know when he finds the time to sleep. I can only get him out to the cantina with us by prior appointment, and even then only if it’s during dinnertime.”

“Weird.” Rey tilted her head. “He’s always free when I need him. Or almost always.”

There had been the time she’d wanted a sparring partner, and he’d been in the middle of fixing some bug with the UV purification array in the air ducts. Everything else she’d needed him for, he’d been happy to shelve whatever he’d been doing and tag along.

“Maybe he’s avoiding me,” Poe said, looking suddenly stricken.

“I’m sure that’s not it. He likes you.” Rey couldn’t imagine Finn refusing Poe any more than she could imagine him refusing her. “Maybe I’m just catching him at the right part of the day.”

“Sure,” Poe agreed hesitantly. “That sounds reasonable.”

* * *

“Hey, Finn!” Poe broke into a trot to catch up with the retreating figure.

Finn stopped and looked around, his eyes scanning the bustling hangar until they landed on Poe, and the slightly anxious, too-intense expression transformed into one of joy. He waved, then started walking back toward Poe. The moment Poe opened his mouth, one of the mechanics turned on the compressor. Poe bit back a sigh. He’d been planning on dragging Finn to the cantina anyway. Not being able to talk in the hangar was as good an excuse as any.

Finn followed him into an access corridor, smirking as the door slid shut behind them and cut off the excess noise. “They can barely keep up with the new pilots enlisting, and some moon jockey took off an A-wing’s stabilizer with a tree branch trying to impress a girl.”

Poe blushed. 

“I wasn’t trying to impress a girl, I was trying to win a bet with Pava.” He coughed into his fist. “Which I did. Since drinks are on her for the night, I was thinking you might want to come out with us?”

“Oh. Uh.” Finn froze, the smile sliding off his face and his eyes going a little wider. “I was just going to…” 

Poe kept his own expression carefully neutral even as his heart sank. Finn gave away more than he thought he did, which would have been adorable if it hadn’t been more evidence that he’d spent most of his life stuck in a helmet meant to hide the fact that he was human. He was clearly floundering for an excuse, trying to come up with something that needed doing. Poe tried not to feel the sting of it quite as keenly. It wasn’t even that Finn always had time for Rey. That made sense, at least. Who wouldn’t make time for a pretty Jedi who thought they’d hung the moon? But it seemed like Finn had time for everyone else on the base, plus half the droids.

“Finn!” Rey’s voice rang through the hall. “I need you to help me with something. Are you free?”

“Of course.”

Poe was proud of himself for not flinching at the automatic agreement. 

It was ridiculous, and on a certain level he knew it. Everyone had heard the story of General Organa’s rescue. Alderaan had been lost, the Death Star was promising an end to any hope of restoring the Republic, and a stormtrooper had taken off his helmet and said “I’m here to rescue you.” For her, though, it had been destiny. Luke Skywalker, her lost brother. Han Solo, her one true love. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the last of the Jedi Knights. They’d been the stuff of epic. A pure romance, except that it had really happened. Some primitive, shell-shocked part of Poe’s brain had hoped it would be the same for him when a handsome stormtrooper took off his helmet and told him he was there to save him. But people like him didn’t have a destiny.

Finn had needed a pilot. He’d picked Poe because Poe was all he’d had. He’d completed Poe’s mission because Poe hadn’t been there to do it himself. He was a good man and a true friend, but there hadn’t been anything special about their connection. Finn and Rey, though. Poe smiled in spite of himself at the look Finn gave her. _That_ might be destiny.

Poe had spent the last few months trying to figure out where wanting to protect Finn ended and simply wanting Finn began. Rey seemed to want everything, all at once, without recognizing any kind of difference. He still wasn’t sure quite what they were to each other. He’d thought he’d known when she’d moved into Finn’s quarters, but then he’d dropped by one morning to find them fully clothed and curled up together like puppies in Finn’s bed, with Rey’s cot pushed against the far wall and their belongings still falling neatly to either side of an invisible line bisecting the room. They’d gotten up with no sign of embarrassment or a further need for privacy before following him to the emergency meeting that had been called in the greatroom.

For his own part, Poe had been too surprised and suddenly hopeful again to trust himself with the question, and the opportunity hadn’t come up again. The only label he knew to apply was _close_.

“Luke said I needed to work on meditation,” Rey explained, shoving her pack at Finn. He took it without question and slung it over his shoulders. “The General suggested the forest, since it’s quieter and better for that sort of thing than the base. Can you be our guide, Poe?”

Poe blinked at her. He’d set foot outside the base’s perimeter all of once, and it had been to retrieve a tiny probe BB-8 had somehow launched without proper authorization and then promptly lost control of. He’d never been out of sight of the watchtower. Rey’s lips thinned, and her eyes narrowed slightly, and she glanced pointedly at Finn, who didn’t seem to notice.

“Sure?” Poe said.

It wasn’t until he was following Rey past a tree that he was sure he’d seen before that it occurred to him exactly how bad an idea it was to follow a girl from a desert planet into the woods. She sloughed her water-bladder at the base of an enormous tree she’d seemingly chosen at random. It was possible she was just tired, Poe thought. The bladder was fully inflated and almost as big as Finn’s pack. It would keep the three of them hydrated for days, though Poe hoped it was just Rey’s outsized sense of caution and not a projection of how long she expected them to be out there. Rey sat down and crossed her legs.

“What happens now?” Finn asked, adding his pack to the pile.

“I meditate,” Rey announced happily. “It’s like doing nothing, but in a really specific way.”

“That seems…” Finn trailed off, a mix of confusion and apprehension on his burnished features. “What’s the point? How does doing nothing do something?”

“It’s supposed to give me clarity,” Rey said, shifting position. “He said I don’t have a lot of the blocks he did when he first started with Master Yoda, but me paying attention to everything all the time is holding me back when I try to use the Force to be aware of things.” She wrinkled her nose. “Except it made sense when he said it.”

“Oh.” Finn nodded, and Poe’s heart melted a little at how ready he was to follow Rey into anything. 

The younger Resistance members tended to be over-awed by the thought of a real live Jedi among their ranks, and the older ones kept a respectful distance and held their breath, hoping. Finn, who had grown up with the wrong side of the Force up close and personal, stood right next to her and asked how he could help. 

“How long does it take?” Finn asked.

Rey leaned back against the tree. “Luke said I’d know when I was done. You two want to find someplace comfortable for us to eat later? We could have dinner before we head back.”

“Yeah,” Poe said quickly, nudging Finn back toward where he thought he’d seen a clearing earlier. He was both intensely relieved that he’d thought to bring his homing beacon and unsure how he’d ever live it down if Jessika weaseled out of buying everyone drinks because he’d gotten lost just a few klicks from home.

Finn fell into step behind him, not stopping until Poe turned toward the clearing.

“Wrong way,” Finn said, tilting his head in the opposite direction.

“I don’t think it is,” Poe said, frowning. He didn’t feel entirely lost, at least. “There’s a little patch with just grass over here.”

“That? It’s a seep. It’ll be damp and muddy at best,” Finn explained. “There’s a bent tree further to the east that’s about bench height, and the ground looked dry and fairly level. Come on.”

Finn led the way, and Poe followed him gamely. The tree was just as he’d described it, and right where it should have been.

“You can get us home, right?” Poe asked. He spread a tarp and flopped down on it, then watched as Finn lifted himself onto the tree trunk. It was just a shade too high, and his feet didn’t quite reach the dirt.

“Sure, but isn’t that why Rey asked you to come?”

“I think she was just being nice and giving me an excuse to get off-base until everyone simmered down about that stabilizer,” Poe said. He wasn’t quite up to confessing their mutual worry to Finn’s face. “I’ve never been much for camping. You might have noticed the second time we passed that tree she picked.”

“We passed that tree five times, actually,” Finn corrected ruefully. “If I’d realized you were lost instead of trying to find her the right spot, I’d have said something.”

“I guess it got her where she wanted to be,” Poe sai. “That’s what counts, right?”

Finn nodded, then stretched slowly. Poe tried not to be too blatantly appreciative, in spite of the fact that Finn was wearing the jacket Poe had given him to replace the one ruined in the fight on Starkiller Base. It was new, and a better fit than Poe’s old one had been. Objectively, it looked better on him. Poe still couldn’t help but miss the figure Finn had cut in the battered coat that had kept Poe warm through countless missions, the coat that had been very definitely _his_. Finn had looked almost rakish in it.

“Do you want to take the first perimeter sweep, or should I?” Finn asked.

“Perimeter sweep?” Poe echoed. “Buddy, it’s a gorgeous day, and we’re close enough to the base that they’d have picked up anything we’d have to worry about. Just relax. Try meditating.”

“I can’t--that’s not--” Finn shot him a stricken look, and Poe recognized it as an expression he’d seen on Finn’s face repeatedly. Finn looked away. “I’m not a Jedi. Doing nothing would just be doing nothing.”

“What’s so bad about doing nothing?” Poe asked gently.

“I wouldn’t!” Finn snapped, sliding to his feet. “I’m not a shirker.”

Poe felt something click into place, then. He’d been trying to pick events and places where Finn would have fun and meet people. He’d been hoping to tempt Finn into coming along, to be interested in getting to know him in a more social setting. Rey had announced she’d needed Finn’s help with something, and Poe doubted she varied much on that approach. Small wonder she always got a yes and he got a panicked explanation that there was work to be done.

Poe sat up, bracing himself on his elbows, and looked up at Finn. “You know you do at least twice as much as anybody I know without a rank attached to their name, right?”

Finn blinked at him, clearly startled, then shook his head. “I owe a lot more than most people.”

Poe pursed his lips, biting back the automatic retort that it wasn’t about owing, and even if it was, Finn certainly didn’t.

“You know where we’d all be without you, right?” Poe asked. “Rey would still be on Jakku, and everyone else would be blasted to bits courtesy of the starkiller. I think you’ve got the right to a few minutes to yourself, by that reckoning.”

“That’s not--” Finn stopped and spread his hands, frustrated. “I didn’t do anything but tell them about the schematics.”

“Finn,” Poe said, his voice soft. Finn finally turned to look at him, his unhappiness clear in his eyes. “Sit down, okay? Just sit here with me, for a little while. I promise nothing bad’s gonna happen. Please.”

Finn looked in Rey’s direction, and Poe sighed.

“She’ll be fine,” he assured him. “She’s got her lightsaber, right?”

“Yeah.” Finn’s shoulders lost some of their stiffness. “And about thirty liters of water to throw if that doesn’t work.”

Poe shook his head. “How did she even stay upright with that on her back?”

“I think she was using the Force,” Finn said, his brows knitting. 

“The Force? On a hike?” Poe looked up at the canopy and started laughing. “That’s cheating!”

“Is it?” Finn asked. “She’s been practicing a lot when she’s not on supply shuttle runs. Comm...Luke Skywalker said she had a lot of catching up to do.”

“Good for her,” Poe said, still chuckling. He could imagine Rey in her and Finn’s room, moving things around with a wave of her hand while Finn tried to finish some report or facilities improvement proposal. “But see? This is part of my point. She’ll be fine. She doesn’t need us hovering over her like mother hens right now. Sit.”

Finn sat down reluctantly, reflexively glancing at Poe for confirmation, and Poe smiled broadly.

“If it’s not scheduled, and you’re not on the roster, you know nobody _expects_ you to do something, right?” Poe asked, once Finn had relaxed enough that he wasn’t worried about him darting off into the woods on a perimeter check.

“I was a stormtrooper, Poe.” Finn hugged his knees to his chest. “And I don’t really know how to be anything else, which makes it hard for everyone else to forget it. I can’t go around giving them more reasons to not.” He swallowed, then laughed bitterly. “To not trust me. Not if I want to stay here, anyway.”

“Buddy, if they didn’t trust you, they wouldn’t let you near everything you’ve been working on for the past few months,” Poe said. “You want to take this base out, sabotaging the water purification system would do it almost as quick as a Death Star. The General signed off on you tinkering with it almost as soon as you were back on your feet.”

He sat up all the way and tentatively rested his hand on the small of Finn’s back. He looked like he could use the comfort, but it was difficult to get a bead on how he would respond to being touched. Rey could practically sit in his lap without getting so much as a raised eyebrow, but he’d seemed painfully shy about it--even with people he’d met and worked with before--the last few times Poe had gotten him to socialize over meals. To Poe’s surprise, Finn leaned into him gratefully, his head resting on Poe’s shoulder. 

Poe snaked his arm around Finn’s ribs and held him close. “The Resistance is home for as long as you’ll have us, Finn.”

“Even if I run out of useful intel?” Finn asked quietly.

“Even if.”

“Even if I--”

“Finn, buddy.” Poe laid his cheek on Finn’s head. “There’s a lady whose only useful skill is directing flight traffic. She’s up there every day, Force be with her, but that’s it. That’s all she can do to help. And she’s been doing it forever. I mean, she helped coordinate the evacuation of _Hoth_. She joined up to fight the Empire. Her parents got killed at a protest when she was young. When the Empire folded, nobody would have faulted her for retiring. She’s got kids of her own now, even a grandbaby on the way. But she heard what the First Order was doing, and she decided to stay. She wants to keep them safe, and this is what she knows will help with that. And all the people who might be stuck doing her job but can do something else, they’re free to do something else. You follow?”

Finn nodded after a moment.

“Just being here puts a target on our backs. For you maybe more than most of us,” Poe said, holding Finn a little tighter. “There’s nobody out here who’s going to forget that. We’re in it together.”

Finn relaxed against him, and Poe suddenly realized just how much tension had been in his frame. He slid his arm lower, around Finn’s waist, and pressed a quick, chaste kiss to his forehead.

“You get what I’m trying to say, don’t you?” Poe asked, his voice soft.

“Yeah.” Finn rubbed at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. “I think so.”

“Good.”

* * *

“Did you kiss him?” Rey asked, her knee knocking against Finn’s every time she bounced her heel. Finn nudged her away with an embarrassed grunt and hid his face behind his ration bar. The tree swayed gently in the breeze, and they braced themselves against the bigger branches.

“No. Why would I have kissed him?” Finn asked. His eyes strayed toward the sunset, and Rey grinned. It was beautiful, and for once, Finn seemed to be enjoying it without the lingering miasma of guilt at taking the time to do it properly.

“You want to kiss him,” Rey pointed out reasonably. Finn’s cheeks darkened, and she elbowed him. “And he wants you to kiss him.”

“The Force tell you that?” Finn grumbled.

“No. I had to use my eyes,” Rey laughed. She’d been working on that technique, but she wasn’t there yet. Luke had said it was important when it came to negotiating talks and keeping the peace, to be able to tell whether people really wanted to fight or were just frightened or why exactly everyone was so frustrated with each other. She hoped it was a long time before someone needed her to help them settle their differences diplomatically.

Finn sighed and put his arm around her shoulders. The forest’s chill was nothing compared to the wind that kicked up on Jakku once the sun set, but she appreciated the gesture regardless. Somewhere behind them, Poe was snoring.

“I can’t believe he fell asleep like that,” Finn said, shaking his head. “He didn’t even unpack a blanket first.”

“He’s been pulling double-duty all this week,” Rey explained. “This was his first day off, really.”

Finn snorted. “I can’t believe he decided to spend his first day off telling me not to work so hard.”

His eyes went soft, and Rey bit her lip. Finn seemed less troubled than he had in weeks. She hadn’t been sure Poe would really talk to him, even if she left them with little else to do while she meditated. It had been tempting to eavesdrop instead of focusing on Luke’s instructions. She wanted to ask what it was Poe had told him.

“You should kiss him,” she said instead.

“Would you be okay with that?” Finn asked after a long silence.

“I like Poe,” Rey pointed out. “And Poe likes me. And we both want you to be happy. Why wouldn’t I be okay with it?”

“Some people aren’t.” Finn shrugged, then offered her a bite of the ration bar. “Do you want to kiss him?”

Rey took the bar from him and turned it over in her hands. “Yes. But I don’t know if he wants to kiss me.”

“Everyone wants to kiss you,” Finn said simply.

Rey closed her eyes and focused on the warmth blossoming in her chest. It wasn’t what he’d said, which she thought might be him teasing her anyway, but the conviction with which he’d said it. Like he couldn’t imagine anyone who didn’t love her. She slipped her hand into his and gnawed at the pressed protein cake.

“It’s true, you know,” Finn continued, shooting her a sly smile. “Even the people who don’t really want to kiss you still want to kiss you.”

Rey flushed and laughed again. “Stop it.”

“What are you two giggling about up there?” Poe called, his voice bleary.

Rey adjusted her grip on one of the nearby branches and leaned down to get a better look at him. He was still stretched out on the tarp, but he was propped up on one elbow instead of with his head resting on his pack. The blanket Finn had draped over him was half off again and tangled around his legs.

“How everyone wants to kiss Rey,” Finn called back.

“Oh.” Poe took it in stride, as if that were a perfectly normal thing for a pair of adults to be discussing. “How did you even get up there?”

“We climbed,” Finn said.

“I’m a Jedi. I can go anywhere I want,” Rey told him. 

It had been Finn’s idea, when she’d said it was a shame they couldn’t watch the sun go down because of the trees. He knew what he was doing when it came to climbing trees, but she’d found it difficult to apply what she’d learned crawling through the predictable and regular features of downed star destroyers to the more organic outcroppings of the local forest. Finn had told her about one training mission he’d been on where the predominant type of tree had been like that, all the branches uniform and orderly and easy to navigate, and she’d envied him those trees.

“He thinks using the Force is cheating,” Finn confided.

Rey thought about it for a second. “I suppose it sort of is.”

Finn raised his eyebrows, alarmed. “You’re not going to stop, are you?”

“Of course not,” Rey said. She wasn’t sure she could if she wanted to, now that she knew what she was doing. A lot of it wasn’t so different from what she’d done before, growing up. As good as she’d worked to be, there were more times than she could count that a simple bad feeling or sudden insight had kept her clear of danger or led her to trusting someone who could help. It was just that she was more conscious of it now, better at it, and less likely to chalk something up to a lucky guess.

“I’m not going to come up there after you two,” Poe said, raising his voice. “Just so we’re clear on that.”

“You should climb down and kiss him,” Rey whispered. She watched Finn blush again, and he gave her a tortured look.

“You first,” he said.

“Because trees and I really aren’t on speaking terms at the moment,” Poe called.

“We could both go together,” Rey suggested. Her heart beat quicker at the thought.

Finn looked at her and nodded. She dropped his hand and glanced at the ground. “Count of three?”

Poe, she thought, was definitely not going to know what had hit him.

* * *

Finn stretched his neck and shoulders, trying not to disturb either of the others. Rey, her back rounded against his side, didn’t stir, but Poe snuggled more insistently against him, his hand groping for Finn’s hip. His breathing told Finn he hadn’t really woken the dozing pilot, and Finn grinned up at the stars.

Rey had been right, gloriously right, about everything. And Poe’s reassurances had been like a weight sliding from his shoulders, even if Finn didn’t quite believe them. He wondered if Poe had felt the same, when Finn had kissed him, and then he’d looked to Rey only to find her kissing him too. Poe’s face had been that of a man suspicious of his luck but unwilling to let an opportunity pass.

When they’d finally had enough of each other’s mouths, sleep had come quickly for Rey, and it had reclaimed Poe almost as fast. Finn was tired, but he didn’t want to stop savoring the feeling of being at rest, the warmth of their bodies pressed against his, the quiet whisper of the breeze through the leaves above them. He’d found his footing again somehow, with Poe’s hands in his hair and Rey’s lips against his throat. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine the slate being wiped clean, the scales being back in balance.

Rey elbowed him drowsily. “Stop thinking so loud. Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Finn rolled his eyes and stroked her hair until she subsided, then let his mind drift until he was asleep as well.


End file.
